San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
SURF & TURF
When they’re not serving customers, these food & wine pros are catching waves.
Six surfers from the Bay Area food and wine world, all friends or acquaintances, park their cars along Highway 1 to survey the swell at an under-theradar spot just south of Pacifica’s Linda Mar Beach. “Some fun little corners all along the break,” observes Zachary Dorman, 39, hospitality director of SingleThread, Healdsburg’s Michelin two-star restaurant and inn. To translate: The conditions are decent, but not for the faint of heart. (They’ll earn their sunnier, mellower second surf at Linda Mar later in the morning.)
The weather for this late-August dawn patrol is gray and misty, with a chilly south wind.
“It’s the kind of weather only a surfer would get out of bed for,” says Matt Licklider, proprietor of Lioco Wine in Healdsburg. Even though prime Bay Area surfing season is still four to six weeks out, the guys seem delighted to be up early, some of them only able to catch a few hours of sleep after last night’s dinner service.
Northern California surfers seem to be more meteorologically inclined than most, due in large part to the cold water and fickle elements. In the days before the handy Surfline app, surfers would awkwardly triangulate weather data hoping for perfect conditions: a draining tide, an offshore wind and a long-period swell — the latter characteristic of larger, more perfect-peeling waves.
The topic of weather is doubly captivating for this small faction of surfers, since the raw materials of their profession are at the mercy of atmospheric conditions. “Seeing food seasonality through the lens of the ocean is really interesting,” says Jason Alexander, restaurant and wine director of State Bird Provisions and the Progress in San Francisco.
For example, as the weather starts to cool in the Central Valley or the first Sierra snowfall occurs (both usually in October), winds start blowing offshore in the Bay Area. This phenomenon produces the best surfing days of the year — air currents blowing from land to ocean brace the face of the waves, making them smooth and glassy — and also signals a particularly celebratory time for our region: the grape harvest.
But even more reliable than a farmers’ almanac’s worth of meteorological trends is the unpredictable nature of Bay Area weather. “Until you get to the ocean, you don’t really know what you’re going to see,” explains Alexander, 44, a Hawaii native who recently enjoyed a fun morning surfing waistto knee-high peelers at Ocean Beach (a.k.a. OB) even though the forecast had predicted conditions opposite. “Out of curiosity, you still go out to see what the ocean’s doing.”
You could say the ocean has well acclimated these particular surfers to the element of surprise; as such, they’re presumably more adaptable to sudden changes in the high-stakes food-and-wine industry. For Licklider, 48, whose early point-break exploits at Topanga and Surfrider beaches in Malibu emerged from a youth spent guerrilla-skateboarding empty backyard pools, surfing directly correlates to his work as a vintner. He crafts minimalist, European-style wines using grapes from small, familyowned vineyards in cooler climates and more interesting soils.
“The Northern California ocean is aggressive, but I’m not matching its vigor. I’m just trying to find the cleanest line,” says Licklider, who now frequents Salmon Creek in Bodega Bay, an exposed “OB lite” beach break about a 45-minute drive from Healdsburg.
“I can see this in our approach to winemaking. It’s not about chasing down the best vineyard sites or making the biggest kill in terms of sales. It’s more about finding the efficiencies of wine production and trying to work with as much integrity as possible.”
Matt Kosoy, owner of Half Moon Bay’s Rosalind Bakery, appreciates the soulful, experiential nature of both surfing and bread-baking, as they are paradoxical to his former life as a software developer for large-corporation marketing websites — what he calls “Cool Brand X or Cool Brand Y.”
“Working on the internet is mindnumbing,” says Kosoy, 39, whose hands-on sourdough mastery — he honed the skillful juxtaposition be-
tween a brittle crust and gooey interior while apprenticing for Dave Muller at Outerlands — was in some ways a rebellion against tech. His daring surf style on “weird-shaped boards that go very, very fast” is a testament to the courage and focus required for a midcareer pivot from the cybernated new world to the artisanship of the old world.
For most surfers, a standard pre-surf routine commences: Pull on wetsuit (minimum 4/3 millimeter thickness for these cold waters). Wax board (don’t overdo it). Stretch (lunges, supine twists, arm circles).
Scott Clark, chef-owner of Dad’s Luncheonette, the Half Moon Bay eatery located inside a charmingly kitschy red train caboose, doubles the effectiveness of these ritualistic moments by meditating on “things that bring joy — like pizza,” he says, adding that the practice lessens any anxiety that may naturally occur when a mere mortal, however skilled on a surfboard, is about to submit to a force of nature like the ocean. “Or a baby’s smile.” (His daughter, Frost, is almost 3 years old; her arrival in late 2015 was the reason Clark, 32, abandoned the demanding finedining track — he had been chef de cuisine at Saison — to pursue Dad’s, a classic mom-and-pop, with his partner in life and business, Alexis Liu.)
In the challenging restaurant biz, moments of zen have been known to come from more hedonistic pursuits. “Surfing is such a departure from those other things,” says Clark, who took up surfing a few years ago after a friend put him through a rough initiation at OB. Since then, he’s been trying to maximize wave time as elegantly as possible by carving “sensual lines and curves” on a custom 7-foot, 11-inch Furrow single-fin triplane hull.
“For as much movement as is involved in surfing, it’s actually one of the most grounding things I do.”
Similarly, SingleThread chef de cuisine Aaron Koseba seeks equanimity from his ocean adventures, which include spearfishing, freediving and foraging for seaweed (nori, feather boa) or mollusks (limpits, mussels).
“The hum of the ocean reminds me a lot of the kitchen,” says Koseba, 33, who started surfing while living in Sao Paulo in 2006. “There’s a certain calm, from a whirring fan or the sound of the burners firing, that’s akin to sitting out on your board in the ocean, moving with the water.” (The topic is very dear to Koseba, who has published his poetic musings on the ocean’s restorative effects in volume 2 of the Japanese photography journal Terasu.)
For all the ties that bind these surfers, the strongest is their mutual reverence for the vastness and power of the briny deep and its easy ability to put the human experience, on a surfboard or otherwise, into perspective. “You’re you,” says Alexander, tucking his 5-foot-6 Mystic Hulls “spoon” under his arm, looking toward the clouded horizon. “But that’s the ocean.”
Leilani Marie Labong is a San Francisco freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com.
“Surfing is such a departure from those other things.”
Scott Clark, chef-owner of Dad’s Luncheonette